He is not a 19th-century person but a 21st-century person, affably and occasionally judgmentally consorting with some 19th-century cosplayers. Beyond this he is a cipher William Boyd has tried on many different generic hats in his 40 years as an author, but he reports that his readers have engaged particularly deeply with his “whole life novels”. The New Confessions, Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress – purported memoirs or journals in which the narrators, whose lives all span the first 70-odd years of the 20th Century, record decades’ worth of being buffeted by historical upheaval and complex personal relationships – look set to be Boyd’s monuments. This might sound like a bad thing but he always takes his beatings with grace and finds another scheme to make his name. He's extremely adaptable, personable, attractive and a gentleman to boot. He had had two books published in 1826, and they had sold thousands of copies. But his publisher had not fulfilled his side of the contract, and had decamped abroad. Most subsequent fiction is heavily in their debt. Yet the precepts of Romanticism have remained strangely durable, perhaps because capitalist modernity is so closely tied to the idea of individual destiny. Even very late in “The Romantic,” Cashel is still jotting down questions in search of himself. “How have I become the person I am today?” he asks. “Will I always be haunted by my origins and past?” We may live in the realists’ world, Boyd’s engrossing, scattershot novel suggests. But faced with a mirror, we are all Romantics.

Described by one reviewer as ‘Around the World in 80 Years’, Cashel’s adventures take him across the globe to places as varied as Oxford, Venice, Zanzibar and Madras. It’s during his time in Italy that the most significant event in his life occurs: the moment he meets the Countess Raphaella Rezzo. From the start he is completely bewitched by her. ‘And he knew – as an animal knows that he has found his mate. He need look no further, ever.’ However, as we know from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer N I love those books with a big sweeping story you can just sink into and lose yourself. A bit like the literary version of a big comfy blanket in Autumn. At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he returned to Oxford as an English lecturer teaching the contemporary novel at St Hilda's College (1980-83). It was while he was here that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. Life,” says Shakespeare’s Louis, in King John, “is as tedious as a twice-told tale/ Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.” William Boyd’s new novel, isn’t tedious as such – for most of its distended length The Romantic rattles along in high old melodramatic style – but, boy, does it feel twice-told. No, not just twice-told: thrice-, quadruple-told. The life story of a man who, Zelig-like, manages to be present (or at least loitering nearby) at some of the major events of 19th-century history and literature? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Ross, the illegitimate son of the big house, a drummer boy at Waterloo, an officer in the Indian Army refusing to carry out an atrocity, by his late twenties he has partied with Byron and the Shelleys in Italy, had a frenzied affair with an Italian noblewoman, published his first novel, been defrauded, imprisoned for debt and emigrated to the United States to build an ideal community. With his loyal servant Ignatz, he starts the first Lager brewery in America, marries, fathers two daughters, attempts to find the source of the Nile, begins a feud with Burton and Speke, becomes a Consul in Trieste, meets again the love of his youth, Countess Raphaella, but perhaps, all too late.Cashel’s relationships with women tend to be interrupted by either his roving nature or his impetuosity. But there is one woman in particular with whom he becomes so besotted that their eventual parting becomes something that forever haunts him. This is a key theme that becomes a focus of his thoughts and actions as he reaches an age where he increasingly starts to reflect on his life. Can he eventually find happiness, or at least closure? This becomes something that I found had an emotional impact on me as I neared the end of this tale. I’d enjoyed it to this point but now I was somewhat obsessed about knowing how this would all conclude. He had been in Venice for several years, and was now 82. He had grown a beard as a disguise and lived under the false name of Michael Finnegan. In The Romantic we follow the life of Cashel Greville Ross who, you might be forgiven for thinking, was a real person, such is the mastery of Boyd's work. Ross begins life ignominiously enough but he makes the most of the opportunities that come his way. Although I can't help thinking that things happen to Mr Ross rather than him making them occur. In fact when he does have an idea of how to proceed in life it invariably means disaster to some extent. We made our way up to the piano nobile where LB greeted us. He is quite short and, not to put too fine a point on it, very plump. His face is plump, his hands are plump, his fingers are plump. Hair receding, also. He introduced us to his mistress, Contessa Guiccioli, very young, 18–20, I’d say, who matches her paramour in plumpness but, however, is very beautiful with it, speaking hardly a word of English but, looking at her very ample figure, let’s say its noticeable prominences, it is not her anglophony that explains her attraction to LB, I would venture. William Boyd, 70, is the author of 26 books, including Any Human Heart (2002) – adapted for television in 2010 with three actors playing the lead role of Logan Mountstuart – and Restless, the Costa novel of the year in 2006. His new book, The Romantic, is set in the 19th century and presents itself as a biographical fiction inspired by the personal papers of one Cashel Greville Ross, a Scots-born Irishman who fought at Waterloo, met Shelley, smuggled Greek antiquities and set out in search of the source of the Nile, among other adventures. Boyd, whom Sebastian Faulks has called “the finest storyteller of his generation”, grew up in Ghana and Nigeria and lives in London and the Dordogne, from where he spoke over Zoom.

When it comes to his description of love stories, and dalliances, Boyd is rather old fashioned. I did like Cashel’s definition of love “to care more about the person you loved than you did about yourself” (444). What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel? Trio is immensely readable, its descriptions full of light and colour, its humour spot on, its mood a perfect mix of frolicsome and melancholy Sunday Telegraph on Trio

On the plot side The Romantic is smartly stylized to the Victorian novel but it is written the modern explicit manner. This has been a central question of many of the stronger novels by the contemporaries who joined Boyd on Granta’s famous 1983 Best of Young British Novelists list: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot , Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy could all be said to be about the leftovers of a life – and what remains of history. In such company, Boyd is sometimes seen as a more “accessible” or “commercial” writer. But what is often lost behind the sheer pleasure brought by his books is their layered Chekhovian subtleties: Boyd is abundantly talented at capturing life’s disconnections, in prose that provides no easy consolations. This may be why the “whole life” novel, exemplified by Any Human Heart , occupies such a special place in his body of work, and why it is satisfying to see him return to this cradle-to-grave territory. The prose is occasionally original and alert, as in the phrase “the lane gleamed with thin tainted puddles in its rutted surface”, where “tainted” is both rhythmically gorgeous and precisely unexpected. But more often, we’re looking at a serious case of prose-bloat. Cashel, as a child, dreams of education, which “might allow him a chance to move out of the never-ending poverty that the cottiers seemed destined to live in forever”. Never-ending and forever: hmm. Sentences are forever pausing to tell us that “Cashel thought” or “Cashel noticed”, as if novelists had not, even in the 19th century, devised more elegant methods of presenting the workings of perception and consciousness. Cashel is not a real person, of course, although Boyd does his best to convince us that he is. The book is presented as a biography, complete with footnotes, pieced together from a bundle of letters, notes, maps and photographs which apparently fell into Boyd’s hands several years ago. It’s not a new idea, but it’s very cleverly done here and I can almost guarantee that you’ll be googling things to see if they’re true, even while knowing that they can’t possibly be! Secondly, the book is written in the third person. Boyd claims in a prefatory note that he has come across some disjointed scraps of a memoir by Ross and was thinking of writing his biography, but has decided that because the facts are so scanty, “the story of his life… would, paradoxically, be much better served if it were written instead – openly, knowingly, candidly – as a novel”.